Enzo Files

About the Enzo Files series

Enzo Macleod is a half-Scottish, half-Italian forensic scientist who gave up a career with the Edinburgh police to teach biology at a university in Toulouse -- until a drunken bet with a journalist over an unsolved 1970s murder pulls him back into investigation, using modern forensic technique to reopen France's most notorious cold cases. Each novel in the series (bar the last two) is built around one of seven real unsolved French murders that a journalist catalogued in a book-within-the-book, giving Enzo a fresh cold case to crack while his relationships with his ex-wife, his daughters and a rotating cast of Toulouse locals develop across the series. Peter May, who lived in south-west France for years, uses the setting -- the Dordogne, Provence, Paris, Corsica, and Toulouse itself -- as a genuine attraction of the books rather than mere backdrop.

The series was conceived and largely marketed as a seven-book run built around those seven cold cases; May closed it out with Cast Iron (2017) before an unplanned return, The Night Gate, in 2021, which brings Enzo back for a case that reaches into Nazi-occupied France and the modern-day French far right.